Unifying Development Tools with Kovair’s Eclipse Plug-in

Communication problem between software developers and other stakeholders is a big hindrance towards a timely and successful software delivery. The problem escalates with members of the software project team using separate multi-vendor ALM tools for separate activities. The developer needs to hop around various tools to know about the various activities going on in the development lifecycle such as Requirement Management, Defect Tracking and therefore, needs to go through all the documents from various sources. This kind of approach to internal communication is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors.

Kovair’s Eclipse plug-in is an ideal solution to these problems. It enables developers to view and modify artifacts of various ALM tools right from the Eclipse IDE. This facilitates real-time connectivity between the developers, testers and various other stakeholders contributing to an extremely efficient software project development and delivery. Let us consider a business scenario and see how Eclipse plug-in solves real-time accessibility issue by creating a collaborative environment.

Scenario: A Tester raises a Defect and posts a Bug in JIRA. The developer using Eclipse IDE needs to write a piece of code corresponding to the particular Bug that was submitted in JIRA.

Solution: Kovair’s Eclipse plug-in allows the developer to connect to the Omnibus Platform from the Eclipse IDE by providing the required credentials. Once connected, the Omnibus Explorer finds the concerned tools of the project that the developer is working on. Once the Bug artifact is selected from the JIRA tool, all the Bugs can be viewed by the developer from Eclipse.

Kovair plug-in thus, allows only the artifacts of the concerned tools which are required by the developer without overwhelming him or her with too much of information. Moreover, a developer may often need to see only the unresolved Defects during development.The use of dynamic filtering and views addresses this requirement by allowing the user to filter only the relevant information as required. The views and filters that are defined in a particular tool get exposed in the Omnibus Explorer, which then enhances the viewing experience of the developer to a great extent.

As the Requirements, Change Requests or Bugs for a project increases in number, it is often desirable to get cross-tool traceability so as to see which code files were modified to fix a particular Defect or to implement a certain Change Request. Kovair’s Eclipse plug-in supports this by storing the links of the Code files, Classes or Methods written in Eclipse to the artifacts of various tools in the Kovair repository. These links are fetched from Kovair and are shown in the Eclipse IDE. Thus, a developer remains knowledgeable about the progress of the project without leaving the Eclipse environment.

The artifacts of various tools that are to be exposed to the developer from the Eclipse IDE are configured from the Kovair Application. Thus, seemingly vast and complex workflows can be configured and managed from the Kovair Application. The powerful and interactive user interface of the Kovair Application enables the user to configure the workflows in a few mouse clicks. Once the configuration is done, all the developer needs to do is to connect to the Omnibus Platform via Kovair’s Eclipse plug-in. The plug-in, thus allows the Eclipse IDE to be connected to the integrated ALM ecosystem enabling one to benefit from the best-of-breed ALM multi-vendor tools and judiciously use time and resources.

Currently, Kovair’s Eclipse plug-in supports all the Eclipse JEE releases such as, Helios, Galileo, Juno, Europa and others. The plug-in currently supports 3.3 to 4.2 platform versions of the Eclipse IDE. Its support also extends to Eclipse based tools such as Rational Software Architect, Rational Software Modeler and Rational Application Developer. Hence, designers can equally benefit from the use of Kovair Eclipse plug-in.

To view the list of all integrations available at Kovair, please click here.

Arunava Bhattacharya is a Software Engineer at Kovair Software, specializing in corporate solutions and services. Designing configurations to satisfy customers' ALM use cases is his core competency. He also takes keen interest in technical writing and photography.

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2 comments

A very useful solution to bring all the developers in synchrony with the overall development ecosystem. The views on only the relevant bug reports is very intuitive, which helps the developers to focus on specific solutions, without overwhelming about the other bugs.